


Beyond the Singularity

by seekingferret



Category: Robot Series - Isaac Asimov
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:49:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5467250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the way back to Earth- home sweet home!- after his adventure on Aurora, Lije and Daneel talk about the past and the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beyond the Singularity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [docholliday18](https://archiveofourown.org/users/docholliday18/gifts).



Lije Baley's fourth trip through space was different in one key respect from his first three: He was not left alone. On his trip to Solaria, surrounded by unfamiliar robots, it had been his own choice to isolate himself. On the return trip, there had been thoughts of Gladia to occupy his mind, and on the trip to Aurora, the discomforting presence of Giskard Reventlov had kept him from much intimate conversation with Daneel. But on the return trip from Aurora to Earth, at last Lije Baley was in the company of a true friend. He tried to savor it as much as possible, for he knew it was unlikely that he would see Daneel again for a long time. And yet there was a part of him that struggled to know what to say. His bond with Daneel had grown while remaining unspoken. He felt comfortable with the robot, but he knew that if he said nothing, Daneel would be content to stand silently in their shared cabin, as if he were dormant in one of those wretched Auroran alcoves. It was hard, sometimes, to decide if what Daneel felt for him was affection. But enough! All Lije knew was that he got pleasure from spending time with Daneel, and talking to him lent clarity to his own thoughts.

"I only just discovered, friend Daneel, that what Dr. Gerrigel told us all those years ago was not quite accurate."

"Oh? Partner Elijah, what did he tell us?" In a human, this might have been said in an offended voice, but Daneel said it with the same robotically even tone that he said everything. Yet Lije thought he detected a sense of wounded pride anyway. Complete, accurate recall wasn't something robots took pride in, it was just a fact of their natures. To be told that his recall was incomplete was almost to tell Daneel that he was defective.

"Surely you remember better than I do. After all, with your positronic brain you retain everything you have ever seen or heard or felt indefinitely, while my human memory deteriorates over time. Is that not so."

"It is so, Partner Elijah, but I do not recall anything Dr. Gerrigel told us that was inaccurate. Everything he told us about the operation of robots is in accordance with my understanding of the science of robotics. And I have been trained, as you well know, by Dr. Han Fastolfe, who is the greatest roboticist of all time. If Dr. Gerrigel had told us any untrue things about robots, I would have corrected him and you at the time." Dr. Fastolfe, whom Elijah had just left behind on Aurora. He was a friend, Baley supposed, and perhaps he was the greatest roboticist of all time, if Daneel said so, but he was not infallible. Yes, he had been wrong about the robocide of Jander, though Elijah could not confess the truth of the case even to Daneel. For a moment, he hesitated, feeling an almost physical ache in his chest at the thought of keeping the secret of Giskard from Daneel, not to mention Dr. Fastolfe and... Gladia.

"This is all true. Still, an inaccurate statement was made, for Dr. Gerrigel did not know the full truth. I only realized it recently, when viewing some historical book tapes I watched at the recommendation of Dr. Fastolfe."

"What was the statement?

"Dr. Gerrigel told us that no effort had ever been made to develop a theory of robots without the First Law." He had been insistent on this point, until Baley had been forced to accept it as a fact, at a cost of much personal humiliation. Even after the satisfactory resolution of the case, he had caught himself reliving those humiliating moments when he had falsely accused Daneel and then Dr. Fastolfe of committing the murder. It gave him much satisfaction now to realize that Dr. Gerrigel had been wrong, even though it still had no bearing on the case, even though for all intents and purposes what Dr. Gerrigel had said was true for the era in which they lived. 

"This is not true?" Again, the sound of almost-pride in Daneel's voice, or perhaps again Lije was imagining it. 

Lije spoke softer as he corrected the narrative, as if he were perhaps ashamed to be correcting his friend. This was silly, he tried to tell himself, for if Daneel valued anything, it was improving his knowledge of the world and especially of humans. It was his fundamental programming, long before he had been reprogrammed as a detective. 

"It's not true, though the facts of it have largely been lost to history. It's not surprising that Dr. Gerrigel, a practical expert at robotics with only a casual interest in their history, would not know otherwise. But Dr. Fastolfe inadvertently called my attention to the truth, when he mentioned the legends of the early days of robotics, the stories of Dr. Susan Calvin and of Andrew Martin."

"All of the robots in the Calvin legends I am aware of follow the First Law."

"True! If you merely read the legends, you would get the impression that the very first robots were positronic robots programmed with the Three Laws of Robotics by Dr. Lawrence Robertson. Even if you study just the popular histories of robots that are in common circulation today, you would get the same impression. But if you go back to the sources, to the early histories of the lives of Susan Calvin and Alfred Lanning, as I did, you will find that there is more to the story than that. In those early days, when Robertson and Lanning unveiled the first positronic robots with the Three Laws, the robots weren't just competing against humans for jobs. They were also competing against other robots- non-positronic robots! These were simple computing machines, typically specialized for and excelling at only one task. Vehicles were assembled in factories by non-positronic robots programmed solely for the task. In some cases, these vehicles were themselves robots programmed to drive people around and avoid obstacles. All of this programming was not the sophisticated analog potential-balancing that happens in a positronic brain, but a rudimentary variant of the Boolean algebra. By some estimates, there were millions of these robots, in various forms, on Earth, if not billions." As he spoke, Baley paced across the cabin. It was an unconscious gesture. If asked about it later, he would have denied moving, until confronted with the incontrovertible evidence that Daneel remembered standing and watching him pace. 

"This sounds extremely dangerous. Without the First Law to protect humans, what kept the robots stable?"

"There was very little to make the robots unstable. The early non-positronic robots could only do what their programmers told them to do, exactly, in a basic step by step fashion. They had no capacity for interpretation, as positronic robots such as yourself do. Consider the legend of Susan Calvin and the Nestor robot who was told to get lost. A non-positronic robot would not have been able to come up with a literal interpretation of such an idiomatic expression. Being given an instruction outside of its program set, it would have had to request clarification rather than attempting to find a mathematical balance between the positrons in its positronic circuits. In a way, the very simplicity of the non-positronic robots was a protection against unstable behavior."

"How, then, did they vanish? Why was the triumph of the positronic robots so complete?" That, Baley thought with some satisfaction, was what he loved so much about Daneel. He could be given new information that completely contradicted everything he knew about the world and within moments he would reformulate his worldview to fully accommodate the new information. It was, for a man like Baley, a far more powerful way to reprogram a brain him than any technique Dr. Fastolfe knew. But there were very few people- man or robot- it would work on. Most were too set in their programming.

"Ultimately, humanity recognized that the safety of the Three Laws was necessary to protect society, and rejected the use of any robots that were not programmed with them."

"That seems like a wise choice."

"Then you don't understand humanity at all, partner Daneel, because that's the farthest thing from what happened. I was just making a joke. In actuality, it was an economic reality that won out. The so-called 'artificial intelligences' guiding the non-positronic robots were so simple that they needed a lot of guidance from human programmers, who would need to continuously monitor and update the computer code running these machines. And these were purpose built robots- robots for making groundcars, robots for making airplanes, robots for making roads and buildings and on and on! Each one needed to be specifically designed for its final purpose, and that was expensive. Lanning and Robertson's positronic robots were individually more expensive, but they were versatile and adaptive. A single robot could be used to do the function of fifty or a hundred non-positronic robots. Pretty quickly, the U.S. Robots' competitors realized that if they didn't switch over to positronic robots, their businesses would die. Those were the dark ages of fiscalism, before civism brought civility and decency to the economy of Earth. In a way, I suppose, there was a perverse wisdom in that fiscalism, since it did result in the complete repudiation of non-positronic robots and thus salvation of the planet."

"You speak truly, for I cannot even contemplate the idea of robots operating without the First Law without fearing for humanity. But there is something my logical circuits cannot figure out. How could humanity in those days allow so many robots to walk the planet without even the most basic safeguards, yet today most of Earth lives in fear of even a single positronic robot, which is completely incapable of causing harm to a human?"

"This is a very good question, Daneel, one which I myself asked as I viewed the ancient histories. It seems to me that it is the single most crucial question, if we are to bring Earth out of the dire dark age it is now locked in. There were in fact those people in those ancient days who raised the question. They spoke about the Existential Risk to humanity that such uncontrolled intelligences posed, and suggested that as the sophistication and complexity of the artificial intelligences increased, Earth would be heading toward a moment when instead of humanity ruling the Earth, robots would rule humankind. They called it the Singularity. But their warnings largely fell on deaf ears. Fiscalism was the law of the day and it drove first the rise of the non-positronic robot and then its fall. Industrialists ignored the warnings of the Singularitarians and built robots for their factories because they were cheaper and more reliable than human labor. And then they discarded those same robots when positronic robots proved cheaper and more effective, let safety be damned!" 

"Then it seems like there is no lesson to be learned from this chapter in humanity's history. Without fiscalism, humanity is like a different species with different motivations. Perhaps that is why they fear us robots now."

"Perhaps. But Dr. Fastolfe is in firm control on Aurora, and the factions on Earth that support emigration have avoided the blow that my failure on Aurora would have caused. At last, I think, humanity has a chance to shed its prejudices and create a new start on new worlds. Perhaps we can discard both fiscalism and civism and find a new civic religion with less harmful side effects."

"I sincerely hope for it, Partner Elijah." There was something deeper than the First Law at play here, Baley thought. Daneel's hope for the future of mankind grew out of more than just a desire for man to avoid harm. It arose out of Daneel's desire to see his- Lije Baley's- dreams come true. There was a word for that kind of desire. It was called friendship, and no matter if it arose in the heart of a man or the positronic brain of a humaniform robot, it was real, by Jove!

"I will surely not live long enough to see it fully take root, but I hope that someday you will see it come to pass." It was another chance at eternity, beyond the singularity.


End file.
